A physician and poet Friedrich Krasser lived in the little town of Sibiu in Austrian-Hungarian empiry (now, in Romania).
He was well known for his progressive thoughts and his love of science. In July of 1869,
he held a garden party, and, in a mood of exuberance, told his friends: "You may believe
or not, but I am convinced that in a hundred years, man will travel to the moon!"

In July of 1969, exactly one hundred years later, Neil Amstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.
25 years after that proprecy, a grandson was born to Dr.Krasser, and his name was Hermann Oberth.

Hermann Julius Oberth, born June 25, 1894 in the Transylvanian town of Hermannstadt, is,
along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert
Goddard, one of the three founding fathers of rocketry and modern
astronautics. Interestingly, although these three pioneers arrived at many
of the same conclusions about the possibility of a rocket escaping the
earth’s gravitational pull, they seem to have done so without any
knowledge of each other’s work.

When Hermann was two years old, his family moved to Schaessburg where his father
had been appointed Director of the City Hospital. Hermann was unusual child. Before seven, he began to make entries
in a little Notebook of Invertions. His first invention was a huge waterwheel,
and second one was the Lighting Factory which collected lightings and stored their energies for later use.

Oberth’s interest in rocketry was sparked at
the age of 11. His mother gave him a copy of Jules Verne's From The
Earth To The Moon, a book which he later recalled he read "at least
five or six times and, finally, knew by heart.” It was a young Oberth,
then, that discovered that many of Verne’s calculations were not simply
fiction, and that the very notion of interplanetary travel was not as
fantastic as had been assumed by the scientific community.

At age of 13, he computed the force of inertia to which Jules Verne's space
travellers would be exposed during acceleration in the gun barrel. - "47 thousand
times the earth's gravity. They would be flattened into pancakes. A cannon isn't good for
space flight. It have to be done with a rocket. Hermann loaded his rowboat with
rocks, and by pushing rocks out, hr checked the rocket principle. Talking with
town experts in guns, he came to the conclution that powder is nor sufficient for flights
to the moon and planets. Liquid propellants have to be used. And he considered
the most powerfull combination could be liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

By the age of 14 Oberth had already
envisioned a “recoil rocket” that could propel itself through space by
expelling exhaust gases (from a liquid fuel) from its base. He had no
resources with which to test his model, but continued to develop his
theories, all the while teaching himself, from various books, the
mathematics that he knew he’d need if he was to ever challenge gravity’s
dominion.

Oberth realized that the higher the ratio between
propellant and rocket mass the faster his rocket would be able to travel.
Problem: as the rocket expends fuel, its mass (not including fuel) remains
the same, in essence becoming heavier and heavier in relation to the
engine’s ability to provide thrust. Solution: stages. Hermann Oberth
reasoned that as one section of the rocket cylinder becomes expended, and
therefore also becomes dead weight, why not just get rid of it? This idea
is especially important, in light of the fact that in space, velocity is
additive. Oberth wrote, “the requirements for stages developed out of
these formulas. If there is a small rocket on top of a big one, and if the
big one is jettisoned and the small one is ignited, then their speeds are
added.”

In 1912 Hermann Oberth enrolled in the University of Munich to study medicine. His
scholarly pursuits, however, were interrupted by the First World War. In
an indirect way, Hermann Oberth’s participation in the war, mostly with
the medical unit , was, in some ways, fortunate for the future of
rocketry. Hermann Oberth stated it best when he wrote that one of the most
important things he learned in his years as an enlisted medic, was that he
"did not want to be a doctor”. When the war was over, Professor Oberth
returned to the University of Munich, but this time to study Physics with
several of the most notable scientists of the time.

In 1918 Hermann Pberth married Mathilde Hummel, known Tilly.
She shared all his triumphs and tribulations. After the end of World War I, part of
Hungary with Schaessburg was given to Rumania.

In 1922 Oberth’s doctoral thesis on rocketry
was rejected. He later described his reaction: “I refrained from writing
another one, thinking to myself: Never mind, I will prove that I am able
to become a greater scientist than some of you, even without the title of
doctor.” He continued: “In the United States, I am often addressed as a
doctor. I should like to point out, however, that I am not such and shall
never think of becoming one.” And on education he had this to say: “Our
educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights,
brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely
discernible.”

Mo publisher was willing to accept Oberth's book. Helped Tilly with
her household saving.
So in 1923, the year after the rejection
of his dissertation, he published the 92 page Die Rakete zu den
Planetenraumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space). This was
followed by a longer version (429 pages) in 1929, which was
internationally celebrated as a work of tremendous scientific importance.

While the book was in print, Hermann Oberth became aware to Robert Hutchins Goddard
who had published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" in 1919. A correspondence between
the two pioneers developed. Around that time he learned about Konstantin Tsiolkovskii,
and they exchanged their papers and a series of friendly letters.

That same year, he lost the sight in his left eye in an experiment while
working as a technical advisor to German director Fritz Lang on his film,
“Girl in the Moon.”

During his work with the film studio in Berlin, Oberth had developed a combustion
chamber and nozzle for liquid propellants and liquid oxygen, the "cone jet nozzle".
He perfected this system and had it officially certified in Berlin in 1930.

In the thirties Oberth took on a young
assistant who would later become one of the leading scientists in rocketry
research for the German and then the United States governments; his name
was Werhner von Braun. They worked together again during the Second World
War, developing the V2 rocket, the “vengeance weapon” for the German Army.

After the war his family movied to Feucht near Nuernburg. later he worked in Switzerland and italy, where
he developed, together with his son Adolph, a smokeless ammonium nitrate rocked.
In 1959, Werhner von Braun invited Hermann to
in the United States at the U.S. Army’s Ballistic
Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. However, three years later
Professor Oberth retired and returned to Germany.
On several occassions, he visited USA - in 1961 as a consultant to Convair in San Diego
and in July of 1969 to see the launch of the Saturn-Apollo rocket that was to take
first men to Moon.

In his books "Matter and Life" and "The catechism of Uranids" we meed Hermann
as a philosopher and humanitarian, who is searching for subtle bridges between mind and matter.
"We need more knowledge about ourselves", he said.

That Hermann Oberth is one of the three founding fathers of rocketry and modern
astronautics is, I think, indisputable. That all three have advanced the
science of rocketry is also indisputable - Professor Oberth, though,
possessed a vision that set him apart, even from these great men. In 1923
he wrote in the final chapter of Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen
(The Rocket into Planetary Space), “The rockets... can be built so
powerfully that they could be capable of carrying a man aloft.” In 1923,
then, he became the first to prove that rockets could put a man into
space.

By all accounts Hermann Oberth was a humble
man (especially considering his achievements) who had, in his own words,
simple goals. He outlined them in the last paragraph of his 1957 book
Man into Space: “To make available for life every place where life is
possible. To make inhabitable all worlds as yet uninhabitable, and all
life purposeful.”

Hermann Julius Oberth died in a Nuremberg
hospital in West Germany on December 29, 1989 at the age of 95.

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